David Ellison

So Lacroix is returning home to the family property in Somerset, which is in reduced circumstances.

Lands have been sold up and it's really just the house that's left.

And he's returning home completely shattered.

This is not an unfamiliar story in relation to people returning home from war.

They need to find a way to rebuild themselves.

He's close to death.

He's experienced the Peninsular War in all of its horror.

It's 1809.

This is not a good time to be, certainly to be in Spain or to be in Portugal.

And something has happened.

We don't know what yet, but we know that it has left him completely diminished, completely ruined.

And it falls to, in the first instance, his housekeeper, Nell, to begin the process of reassembling him.

It's a source of pleasure and it's not articulate.

Because he's deprived of the ability to describe what's happened to him, he searches for something else, something that provides some meaning.

And he has a long-standing fascination with Hebridean folk songs, so he's a kind of precursor to an ethnomusicologist.

And when he does finally begin to get back up on his feet, he is prompted to leave the house

for reasons to do with a soldier, a fellow officer arriving and saying, we need you back.

The situation on the peninsula had not at all improved.

They were losing men at a tremendous clip.

So he feels that kind of pull and realizes that that's simply an intolerable idea.